Hi

I have just replaced my graphics card from a 16MB Vodoo3 with a 64MB GeForce2 one in order to play RTCW and MoH on my PIII 500 with 196MB RAM.However i haven't seen much of an improvement.Is this because the processor/motherboard aren't really up to the faster card?Also when installing one of the demos from the EVO cover-cd(can't remember which one)i got a system message saying AGP card memory 64MB,system AGP memory 24MB(or something like that).Is this the reason?

TIA

Pete Stone

On a machine of that spec, a voodoo3 in 16-bit colour is a strong performer already. The geforce2 cards despite having a GPU still need a hefty processor for starters.
Things to look at would be:

check in the BIOS and see tht your AGP aperture size is set to 64MB, this is the standard and rarely needs to be altered.

If you have a VIA-based motherboard, then you may well be able to adjust the AGP multiplier in the BIOS to 4x. It should at least be able to run at 2x.

If you can see Fast Writes, then this can increase speed slightly, but can also reduce stability slightly.

If you can adjust the AGP voltage in there as well, then adjusting it to DA or EA would be good for card stability as the geforce2's had an issue with some boards where in default settings, they didn't supply quite the right power to the AGP slot.

OS:

What version of the Nvidia Detonator drivers are you running?

On that spec PC, it would be advisable and for simplicity to run your desktop at 16-bit. Quite a few games default to desktop colour palette and 16 bit is far quicker then 32-bit for gaming in GF2's and that spec CPU.

In the display settings, goto settings, advanced, geforce2 tab and click additional properties. Select Anti-Aliasing, select manually control the anti-aliasing and set to off/don't use.
Next, the direct3d Tab, change the mipmap level from best image quality to best performance. Lastly OpenGl tab. default colour palette, set to always 16-bit and vertical sync off by default. Give your games a run now.

Remember to look at the graphics settings in the games and make sure that you are running 16bit colour, or desktop default and if ever given the option, use 16-bit textures and play with the quality settings etc.....

See if that helps at all. Should help a fair bit, but with that CPU, I am not sure just how much...

Cjeers,

Nick:)

Thanks for the info.

I'm a bit of a beginner tech-wise so how do i edit the BIOS?
Also the message i got about system AGP memory only being 24MB.Is this related to this BIOS setup?

Cheers

Pete S

Not sure about the error that you were getting, but all Voodoo3 cards were 16MB according to my memory. The BIOS is actually fairly simple. When you switch the machine on and you see the cpu/amount of memory, you should also see on the screen something like press DEL to enter setup, press F2 to enter setup etc.... From there you will be greeted by the bios. Before moving around through the menus, look at the bottom to see what keys do what. Usually the arrow keys do the navigating for you. For the settings that you are after, you should be looking in something like the advanced BIOS menu and the advanced chipset, or chipset menu. Locate the values that I mentioned, if they are there and alter to my recommeded settings if poss. Pressing Esc drops you back to the main BIOS screen. From there you can select save and exit.

If you are in doubt about anything that you have done, then don't save it and if you are unhappy with playing with the BIOS, then find someone that can:)

Cheers,

Nick:)

Remember to alter the antialiasing stuff etc that I mentioned too in windows, Just as important

Min SPec for Medal Of Honour:
Minimum:
450 MHz CPU
64 MB of RAM
16 MB 3D accelerator video card with OpenGL support
200 MB of free hard drive space
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM
DirectX 8 Compatible Sound Card


So your CPU just wheezes past the min spec.
Those GeForces are hungry chips - they crunch large streams of data, but your CPU must be fast enough to feed it.

Medal Of Honor is quite a spec hungry game - I even noticed a difference dropping down from 512MB to 256MB when I removed a fault RAM chip the other day, and I run a 1.4GHZ Athlon and GeForce3, with WinXP Pro.

-DV

Footlong - I thought the AGP aperture set in the BIOS is the amount of system memory which can used as a cache, cos AGP can use system memory as well as video memory, so maybe a larger setting won't help anyway.
I'm gonna turn mine off and see what happens. :D

Thanks all for the info.

Have done the easy tweaks so far.How can i tell which version of DetonatorXP i have.On the Geforce tab it lists version4,on the diplay settings tab it lists version 4.13.01.218.On the nVidia site it lists version 23.11 as the current version and has been since December-ish and i downloaded it only a couple of weeks ago so do i assume i have this?Where do you look for driver details?
Hope these questions aren't too dumb.

TIA

Pete S

easy, 2 ways, either start settings, control panel, display settings/properties. or right click on the desktop and select properties. Basically follow my instrutions from the first post under OS. Did you make any changes in the BIOS?

Jack, I can't really remember exactly how or why the AGP accesses the system RAM anymore, but you will almost definetly not gain any performance by disabling it. The standard aperture size is 64MB. This is how much of your system that the AGP can use in some way or another if necessary. Running below this doesn't do any good and running say a 128MB aperture doesn't really bgoost it at all any way, doh, godda go star trek is on:o

Cheers,

Nick:)

Have checked AGP aperture in BIOS and it is 64MB.Couldn't see anything about AGP multipliers but the Vodoo3 was only 1xAGP and came with the machine new so assume can't support the AGPx4 of the nVidia card.Couldn't see any thing about fast write either.Have just reloaded the demo that threw up the message.It was 4x4 Evo appropriately enough.It wasn't an error message,it was-
DX7 reports 64MB of memory on your video card
DX7 reports 24MB of AGP system memory
Hope this helps.
Pete S

PS.Still not sure which driver number is the one to quote

shouldn't you be running DirectX8??? i would expect a PIII capable board to be able to support AGP2 if not 4, can you tell us what board it is??? it should say when the PC starts, may have to hit the pause key tho...

Dom

I thought i was running DX8!I've installed it about 3 times.How can i be sure it is DX8 running?

Pete S

PS.Will check motherboard when i get home but i think the chipset is Intel 440bx if this helps

Also try using NVMAX which can boost performance although if the cpu is the bottleneck then this will not help.